Sportfishing bad for stocks

Despite a long-held belief that recreational fishing does not have a serious impact on fish stocks, a paper published this week in Science suggests otherwise. The study found that in 2002, recreational landings for the most relevant overfished populations, including red snapper, black sea bass, and lingcod, accounted for nearly a quarter of the total catch in the United States.Felicia Coleman, of Florida State University, and her colleagues analyzed the recreational and commercial fishery landings over the past 22 years, both at the national and at the regional levels. In the Gulf of Mexico, recreational landings accounted for 64% of the total catch; along the US Pacific coast, the figures reached 59%; in the south Atlantic region 38%, and in the northeast United States 12%. "Policies to protect fisheries have ignored recreational fishing, concentrating only on the impact of commercial fishing. Here, we demonstrate that the recreational component rivals commercial landings in many important stocks and that recreational as well as commercial fisheries require regulation," Coleman told The Scientist. Recreational fishing is not what it used to be, according to Coleman; the solitary rod and reel angler, Izaak Walton style, has been joined by operators that carry groups of dozens of people in large vessels, guided by highly experienced crews. With 10 million sports anglers in the United States, the catch volume can certainly be significant, Coleman said.But the findings did not surprise marine biologist Ransom Myers, of Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. "This is consistent with everything we knew," Myers told The Scientist. "All you have to do is go to Monterey Bay in California or to Florida and look at the number of recreational fishermen there, or the groups in headboats led by professional fishermen. How could these people not have an effect?"Still, James Donofrio of the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA) challenged the findings. Donofrio said he is critical of the data collection system of the Marine Recreational Fisheries Statistics Survey (MRFSS), one of the sources of data used for the Science paper. "The system is broken and needs to be fixed," Donofrio told The Scientist.The MRFSS contacts fishermen and operators by telephone to find out the amount of fish caught and makes direct surveys in the field with the fishermen coming in from the sea. For Donofrio, there are not enough "real time intersections" with fishermen, and that leads to overestimates.Study coauthor Larry B. Crowder, of Duke University in North Carolina, acknowledged that better surveys might increase the precision of the results, but not necessarily the quality. "We need to look at the effectiveness at the current management approach to recreational fisheries," Crowder told The Scientist. "Many tools that policymakers use to regulate commercial fishing can be used for recreational fishing as well, including no-take marine reserves, gear restrictions, and quotas to reduce the effort of recreational fishing."According to Andrew Rosenberg of the University of New Hampshire, a federal ocean commissioner and a former deputy director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, the MRFSS data provides a good basis for this study, which he said was the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of recreational saltwater fishing in the country with a national view of the issue. "The system was designed to understand large-scale patterns and trends of recreational landings. It's not a complete census of the catch, but it is a statistically valid system," Rosenberg told The Scientist. "All this is beside the point. The Science article demonstrates that recreational landings are a large component of the catch for many important fisheries, and they are a significant contributor to overexploitation. We can't pretend they are not."

Sportfishing bad for stocks

Study finds that recreational landings for key species in US were more than 25% of catch

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